


Bluest Skies Of Mourning Light

by captainkilly



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Drabble, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Light-Hearted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-01
Updated: 2017-02-01
Packaged: 2018-09-21 06:02:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9534917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainkilly/pseuds/captainkilly
Summary: It's Karen's birthday. The Punisher is caught unaware by his own legacy.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [evil bunny wolf (evil_bunny_king)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/gifts).



> Based off a Tumblr prompt that arose during a conversation about the Punisher merchandise, in which I was laughing it up about Karen confronting Frank with its existence.

He brings her flowers and a new notebook. Spent so long toiling over the choice in the flowershop that he’s quite sure at least three criminals escaped him in the meantime. Spent even longer on the notebook, because he knows quality when he sees it but the so-called helpful bookstore owner _insisted_ quality and expensive are really the same things when it comes to gifts. (They’re not, because Junior always liked the boxes the presents came in best of all.)

He also thinks that Maria might rise from her grave and yell at him for the better part of an hour if he dares to show up on Karen Page’s doorstep on her birthday and not bring her flowers. “Blue for her eyes, Frank,” Maria would say, “and yellow and purple for the way she is.” He hasn’t forgotten the completely alien-sounding flower arrangements for their wedding. Thinks he might recite the Victorian meaning of flowers out loud if he’s ever captured by criminals again. He thinks it might throw them for a loop long enough for him to rig his escape, if nothing else. The Punisher doesn’t do flowers.

Frank Castle kind of does.

He sees Karen re-categorise what she knows about him the second she opens the door and he’s holding the bouquet out to her. He secretly likes surprising her to the point where her eyes visibly widen and she takes a while to formulate some kind of comeback. He has let the bookstore owner wrap and rewrap the notebook for him. Doesn’t know what the man didn’t comprehend about “no hearts”, but there was no way he was bringing Karen anything wrapped in pink hearts and rainbow unicorns. Even if she is the only “lady friend” he’s got. Even if he thinks Maria would laugh hysterically at the wrapping paper and encourage him to let it be.

“Happy birthday.”

“Thanks..” Karen’s tiny frown is replaced by a genuine smile as she takes the bouquet and the gift from him. It’s that tiny I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-you-smile he sometimes coaxes out of her when he needs stitches in a place he can’t quite manage himself. He re-categorises what amuses her, too. She gestures at the tiny space she calls an apartment. “Come in, Frank, please.”

It’s only when she’s put the flowers in a vase and turns around to face him that he fully registers what she’s wearing. The purple fancy dress with kitten heels is so much like her that it makes him smile, but the pink and rather frilly apron decidedly isn’t. He’s also quite sure that his Punisher logo isn’t the kind of thing to put on something that’s both pink _and_ frilly, but here she is wearing it and he thinks he needs to sit down for a minute.

He does exactly that when she begins to laugh in earnest and smoothes out the creases in the apron. “Like what I’m wearing?” she says with a hint of amusement in her voice that he vaguely registers as being teasing. “It was my birthday present from work. Apparently, you’ve got quite the merchandise section and the girls from HR thought it’d be nice to gift me a box full of it.”

“Why?” He’s aware he sounds genuinely puzzled. He knows about the shirts, of course, because he saw those one too many times while walking down the street. He’s pretty sure he would’ve remembered an apron. “Who would even wear that apron? Aside from you, because you’re just on that side of crazy and I’m _convinced_ you’re wearing it just to spite me.”

She raises her eyebrow at him. “Housewives would wear this,” she deadpans. “Cooks. Other people who need an apron to save their ass in the kitchen.” She contemplates. “You could try to wear it when you go out and see how long it takes for anyone to notice?”

“It’s pink.”

“Well spotted.” God, how he hates that smile that currently curves around her lips. Hates the way it dances in the light of her too-blue eyes, the way it flushes her cheeks, the way he can’t help but smile back at her when her face lights up with it. (He tells himself he hates it, because it’s easier that way.) “As for why I got the giftbox,” she continues with a snort of laughter, “I’m the designated Punisher writer on staff, remember? They think I can’t write about you without carrying a Punisher-themed rambler with me everywhere I go.”

“What the hell’s a rambler, Page?”

She actually has the audacity to gasp out loud and scramble for the box that’s on the chair behind her. He watches with some incredulity as she pulls out a stuffed toy shaped as a skull, a beer jug with a skull imprint, a Christmas ornament he’s quite sure should never carry his logo, half a dozen Punisher Pens (or so the package shouts at him), and a warm woolen blanket he’s sure will unfold to form a skull as well. When she finally turns back to face him, she’s cradling a rather big coffee mug that looks to be part-thermos part-menace.

“Rambler,” she tells him, holding the coffee mug out to him. “They had to tell me the proper name for it too because I just shouted ‘they have a Punisher thermos?’ and scared a potential advertiser into taking his business elsewhere.” She pauses. A wicked little grin appears on her face. “You should take it with you. It holds your shitton of coffee and you won’t lose the little thermos cups again that way.”

He frowns at her.

She just lets out a very girlish giggle he files away as something he hates, too.

“You’re loving this, huh?” He asks her rather warily. “I’ll give your box this much credit: that rambler looks like I could smash someone’s skull in with it.”

“I thought so too.”

Of course she did. He’s not sure when exactly his brand of violence stopped being the thing that kept her awake at night. She sounds smug in her agreement with him, as though she’d expected him to say that long before he commented it. Maria always had that tone of voice too right after he agreed to vacuum the entire house, cook Easter dinner for his entire Italian side of the family, or change a diaper in the middle of the night. He thinks it must be some kind of woman-thing, though none of his Marine buddies seemed to recognise the kind of voice he meant.

He thinks belatedly that _maybe_ it’s a common factor in the women he likes: long-legged blondes bringing him to heel with nothing but a look and smile when their voices coax him into agreeing with absolutely anything just to have their eyes light up like this.

He firmly believes Maria is laughing at his current predicament.

His heart feels a little lighter for it, so when Karen turns to the counter and talks about getting him some cookies he’s not about to turn her down. She’s rambling about how she’d originally wanted to bake a birthday cake but then remembered he was the only one who’d said he’d come over for her birthday. “So then I was thinking, I can’t make you eat the entirety of my chocolate cake because by the time you have two slices it feels like you can’t move and four slices will put you in this food stasis and you probably don’t want the sluggishness that comes with that, right?” She hums happily. Sometimes, he wonders how she even managed to come up for air long enough in these moments. “And when the box contained these little cookie cutters I just kinda figured that I could bake those instead and decorate them all funny and you’re totally going to hate me but it’s my birthday so what the hell, you know?”

He doesn’t think he could ever hate her, but when she puts the plate full of cookies in front of him he almost reconsiders. She’s really gone all-out in making his logo look like something not a soul would be terrified at seeing. Tiny hearts and flowers decorate the skulls – painstaking work he knows takes hours – and some of them have smiley faces and stars on them instead. A lot of the frosting is the most obnoxiously pink colour he’s ever seen. He wildly thinks that Lisa would have loved the hell out of Karen before he bursts into laughter.

It’s the kind of desperate laughter that leaves him gasping for breath and snorting out loud in a very undignified manner. He laughs until his chest feels like it’s going to burst and his stomach hurts in a way that signifies a new kind of injury. He laughs until tears come to his eyes and then he’s crying into Karen Page’s frilly pink apron before he knows what’s even going on inside of him. He knows he’s clinging to her a little too tightly but her hands are stroking his hair and her voice is shushing him and whispering “I know, I know” over and over again and so he selfishly tightens his hold on her a little more.

He finds his centre in her voice when one of her hands drops down to stroke the skin above his collar and her other hand comes to rest on the side of his face. She smells like honey and cream and sweet things that taste like forgiveness even for him, _especially_ for him. Her voice is soft and lilts with the cadence of Vermont meeting New York, home meeting home, come to rest in the steadiness of her heart beating in his ear.

“When my brother died, I couldn’t cry for the longest time. Everyone around me was tearful and apologetic and oh-so-very kind. People used to bring flowers and cards and teddybears to the house. My mom would sit in her bedroom and just weep ugly, jagged sobs all throughout the morning. She’d cry so much over making dinner that I thought the soup tasted saltier for it. My dad cried when he thought we couldn’t hear him, which made it all the worse.”

He centres on her grief while she speaks, though it’s faded to the point where it doesn’t hitch her breath as much as it does his. She’s talked about her brother before in facts and figures. Never like this, however, and he grows quieter just from listening to her.

“I used to think there was something wrong with me for not crying. I was the only stonefaced person at his funeral. I was the only one holding it together all the time, even in the middle of the night when the house grew quiet and you could hear my brother’s absence in the silence. Some months passed like that. Then, the stupidest thing.. I was alone in the house and I was cooking something, but I always listen to the radio when I’m doing that because I like having noise around me when I work, and this song came on the radio and it was Kevin’s song, the one he always sang in the shower and woke me up with on Sunday mornings.. and I stood there chopping up vegetables and hearing that stupid song and I just lost it, you know? I bawled over a bunch of carrots and screamed until my voice gave out and almost started a fire because I forgot to check the meat..”

Her voice trembles against his hair, but she doesn’t lose her feet. He rubs her back as gently as he can. Exhales softly against her as he feels his own stream of tears abate. He knows what she’s saying and not saying in these moments. How hard it is to hold on to your kind of normal in the early hours of the morning. How difficult it is to put your shoes on and go to work. How hard it is to have to be the one the world relies on as its centre, so you can’t lose your gravity in the wake of death. How death itself changes you to the point where you’re the one doing the giving and taking of it with every choice you make.

“Thing is, I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk about your family when you’re here with me.” Her voice is steady, while he doesn’t trust himself to speak. “I know that the silliness of these cookies is something Lisa would do. I know Junior would probably eat them all if nobody was watching him.” There’s a smile in her voice and a light touch of her lips on his head. “I know Maria would tease you mercilessly for crying over a bunch of badly-baked cookies, too. But I’d like to know more about them, if you ever feel like telling me something. Things like these, we shouldn’t be alone to remember.”

He scrapes his throat. Raises his head slightly so that he can look at her. There are tears rolling down her cheek, trickling down her skin in a steady stream of understanding. She’s biting her lip as she gazes down at him. He sees worry in her eyes. Wonders what his own eyes are telling her right now. He knows what she’s tried to do for him. What she continues to do for him every moment she stays with him and lets him be with her. Knows, too, that his family will live on after he’s gone for as long as Karen Page still draws breath.

“Maria didn’t know how to bake,” he finally says. “She tried all the time but all her cakes were flat and her cookies hard enough to bash someone’s head in.” He shakes his head briefly at the memory. “I was always the one doing bakesale shit for the school, you know. Lisa used to eat the frosting before I could put it on. Junior would burn his hand on the too-hot cookies because he figured they were good to eat straight out of the oven.” He chuckles as Karen’s lips curl up into a full-fledged smile. “These right here, I bet they’re as good as my old cookies. Bet they’ll make me sick after the fifth one or so, but I’ll down the entire fucking plate, ma'am.”

She lets out a laugh at that. “Not the _entire_ fucking plate,” she pushes back at him, “because it’s my birthday and I want cookies too.” Her voice is light and warm and so much _Karen_ that he just hums at it. She laughs even harder at her next words. “Next time you run into Matt, you could offer him Punisher cookies as a peace offering.”

“Red ain’t getting my biscuits,” he growls before tugging the plate toward them. She sniggers into his shoulder at that, nose pressed tightly against his shirt and hair tickling his skin. He feels almost apologetic for turning into a jumbled mess on her birthday, but she would probably not hear of a 'sorry’ even if he offered one up. He settles for wiping a stray tear off her face with his thumb. “Thank you, though,” he tells her, and means every word of it.

She snaps one of the cookies clean in half. Offers him the heart-filled part of it while munching thoughtfully on the flower-covered half. He stuffs it into his mouth at once, which almost makes her spit crumbs out over the counter through her laughter. He reaches for the next cookie a few seconds later. He thinks he can make a better cookie than this, but her strawberry frosting’s the stuff that Lisa’s dreams were made of.

“Good?” she asks him, licking the frosting off her own cookie unapologetically.

“Good,” he affirms. “It’s kind of strange that you’re doing that to my face though.”

“Shut up.”

“You can lick my face any time, Page,” he laughs as she looks abjectly horrified for a second. “Just don’t chew on it.”

“Don’t test me.”

“No teeth!”

He decides he loves her when she puts the next cookie between her teeth and clamps down on it with a vicious, sickening crunch and offers him a victorious smile to boot.


End file.
